ABSTRACT
It has often been argued that the description of landscape and place in travel texts demonstrates either a detached engagement between author/observer and the external world, or a destabilized and intimate one, seemingly denying the possibility of achieving both. Roger Cardinal, for example, restricts ‘romantic’, destabilized travel to the period 1815-c.1840. The ‘Enlightenment’ period before that he describes as ‘disinterested, sober, analytical and philosophical’; the period of ‘tourism’ which follows it he portrays as itinerant, normalized and devoid of any ‘risk’.1 Such historical groupings have been further nuanced by assumptions based upon gender, which demarcate detached observation and description as a masculine domain, to be contrasted with the intimacy of female writing:
Recent work has, however, challenged the notion that travelogues are so easily categorized, and has shown that a single text will frequently reveal moments of both proximity and distance in relation to the new environment being visited. Chloe Chard has emphasized that in their encounters with the foreign travellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, like those today, ‘move constantly between destabilized and detached positions’, which she defines as romantic and touristic. The ‘romantic’ view of travel sees that activity as ‘transgressive and destabilizing’; romantic travellers become emotionally and imaginatively involved with the places they visit. The touristic attitude maintains detachment, keeping the unfamiliar at bay through a careful distance from the object of perception. As James Buzard observes of touristic culture in the period 1800-1918: ‘the result is often a vacillation between celebrations of the privileged position of the detached spectator and longings to take part in the integrated panorama or play’.3
